All Stories by Bruce Bower
- Anthropology
North America’s oldest skull surgery dates to at least 3,000 years ago
Bone regrowth suggests the man, who lived in what’s now Alabama, survived a procedure to treat brain swelling by scraping a hole out of his forehead.
- Anthropology
Social mingling shapes how orangutans issue warning calls
The new findings hint at how modern language may have taken root in sparse communities of ancient apes and humans.
- Archaeology
Ancient seafarers built the Mediterranean’s largest known sacred pool
The Olympic-sized pool, once thought to be an artificial inner harbor, helped Phoenicians track the stars and their gods, excavations reveal.
- Archaeology
Ancient Homo sapiens took a talent for cultural creativity from Africa to Asia
Excavations at two sites continents apart show that Stone Age hominids got culturally inventive starting nearly 100,000 years ago.
- Genetics
Africa’s oldest human DNA helps unveil an ancient population shift
Long-distance mate seekers started staying closer to home about 20,000 years ago.
- Archaeology
The world’s oldest pants stitched together cultures from across Asia
A re-creation of a 3,000-year-old horseman’s trousers helped scientists unravel its complex origins.
- Archaeology
A technique borrowed from ecology hints at hundreds of lost medieval legends
An ecology-based statistical approach may provide a storybook ending for efforts to gauge ancient cultural diversity.
- Archaeology
Homo sapiens may have reached Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought
Archaeological finds in an ancient French rock-shelter suggest migrations to the continent started long before Neandertals died out.
- Archaeology
‘Origin’ explores the controversial science of the first Americans
A new book looks at how genetics has affected the study of humans’ arrival in the Americas and sparked conflicts with Indigenous groups today.
- Archaeology
A taste for wild cereal sowed farming’s spread in ancient Europe
Balkan groups collected and ate wild cereal grains several millennia before domesticated cereals reached Europe.
- Archaeology
Gold and silver tubes in a Russian museum are the oldest known drinking straws
Long metal tubes enabled communal beer drinking more than 5,000 years ago, scientists say.
- Anthropology
Homo sapiens bones in East Africa are at least 36,000 years older than once thought
Analyses of remnants of a volcanic blast push the age of East Africa’s oldest known H. sapiens fossils at Ethiopia’s Omo site to 233,000 years or more.
